Good Friday

*Christ Crucified* by Diego Velàzquez (1632).

See, my servant shall prosper, he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.

The Cross stands as the living paradigm into which creation is incorporated, the intrinsic principle through which the last fragment of matter holds together. All being is marked with the Cross, primally configured to its logic. The human soul is created cruciform, awaiting recapitulation in Christ the Lord.

The testimony of the Cross is clear, however obscured to eyes dulled by sin. Even before Christ, the prophet Ezekiel saw God’s servants sealed with the sign of the Tau; Greek and Indian cosmology imaged the sky of solar orbit and the distant heavens of the fixed stars as forming a cross. Yet even now and unto the end of time, the sacred mystery of the Cross is forever being unfolded.

The artist is as one consecrated to present reality transformed, to plumb mystery, to see within, gathering up vestiges and reflections of the divine. The Spanish master Diego Velázquez has done this with his 1632 oil on canvas, Christ Crucified. In it I find, as in many works of genius, a summit which unites opposites. A mystic image, it dispels a too literal-minded emphasis on the physical torments of Jesus, taken apart from the love which specifies their inner content. It portrays, in the phrase of Rainero Cardinal Cantalamessa, “the death of the heart.” The wounds, while unmistakable, are depicted with utmost delicacy. The crossbeam is marked with the blood of the Lamb, as were the lintels of the Israelites through the dark night of the Passover. The classical beauty of the figure, in an understated contrapposto repose, is profoundly reverent; the beauty of the face discreet, partially veiled from the viewer, balancing the tension between they look on him whom they have pierced and he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. The figure of Christ, radiant from within, glows through noonday darkness over the land, a halo of light emanating from the symbol of his eminently meek kingship. The fresh grain of the wood intimates the shoot from the parched earth. Beneath the wound of the spear we glimpse the “secret abyss,” “the spring flowing out of the middle of paradise, dividing into four rivers, inundating devout hearts, watering the whole earth and making it fertile,” in the words of St. Bonaventure.

We behold in this the icon of Christ gentle Jesus, King of Contemplatives, the imagistic realization of the vision of St. John of Ávila, Doctor of the Church: “The head is leaning to hear us and gives us kisses of peace, with which you invite the guilty. The arms are outstretched to embrace us... So, Lord, looking at you on the Cross, all that my eyes see, everything invites me to love: the wood, the figure and the mystery, the wounds of your body, and above all, love within cries out that I love you and that my heart will never forget you.”

Holy Saturday

Holy Thursday